The ISAF committee wanted to have a "kiddies" version of a high performance sailboat instead of a true high performance design.

Basically, daggerboards were disallowed and there were a few other requirements that took all the fun out of the design.

I still fail to see why ALL the mono's sailed by kids have daggerboards, from the opti up to the laser and 29-ers but the youth catamaran was required to have none !

I know AHPC was interested in making the Taipan 4.9 an entry for the new ISAF youth boat, but they refused to put things like rubber bumpers on the bows and remove essentials parts like daggerboards from the design. The (very young) F16 class at the time felt the same way and just ignored these ISAF trails believing the design likely to be chosen would be a hard sell anyway.

I still feel this way. Afterall, 12.500 Euro's for a 150 kg and very simple fitted-out SL16 is not attractive when compared to a 14.165 euro's for a fully fitted race-ready and truly fast F16 at 110 kg. I've just seen the quoted price for the Hobie Max (lost out to the SL16) and I was amazed to see it quoted higher then a F16. Now, that is just wrong !

I feel the ISAF committee missed a "slam dunk" here. They should have gone for the Taipans and be done with it. They didn't and as luck would have it this new SL16 youth class has to fight an uphill battle against a score of better designs in a quickly developping beach cat scene.

Basically they try to sell a totally new One-Design class in a scene that has so convincingly chosen to prefer the Formula setup (A-cat, Tornado, F18 and F16). Added to this is the fact that the class is too narrowly defined for youths. This will make marketing it to adult crews so much more difficult.

Wouter